The Democratic Party and The Negro: Northern and National Politics, 1868-92 [Book Review]

Abstract

During the 1868 campaign the Democrats tallied but 6 1/2 votes in 21 national convention ballots for the only candidate for their Presidential nomination who favored acceptance of Negro suffrage, framed a platform repudiating all steps taken to reconstruct the South as "unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void," and nominated for Vice-President a candidate who favored colonization of all U.S. Negroes and accused the Radical Republicans of promising White women in return for Black votes. Twenty-four years later in the national campaign of 1892 a leading Northern Democratic newspaper accused the GOP of desiring to revive "the horrors of negro domination" in the South, the national platform laid heavy stress on Democratic opposition to a congressional bill which sought to make universal male suffrage effective, and the party's Vice-Presidential regaled audiences with barely-cloaked racist appeals for votes for the Democracy. Between these two elections ,however, the Democrats adopted, according to Lawrence Grossman, both a "new" and a "newer departure" in an attempt to win Northern Negro votes and assure White Northern racial liberals that a Democratic victory would not mean total subjugation of the Blacks, while at the same time allowing Southern Democrats the right to repress Blacks in their states without federal intervention. Grossman's chief contribution is to detail the development of this subtle strategy better than any previous work.